TITLE: Juan Luna’s Revolver
AUTHOR: Luisa A. Igloria
PUBLISHER: University of Notre Dame Press 98 pages,poetry



In Luisa Igloria’s book of poetry “Juan Luna’s Revolver,” the author adopts the theme of the historical Filipino expatriate and his or her experience with the world outside of their Philippine homeland. The Filipino expatriates’ collective experience was one that will be forever linked to the dual phenomena of Spanish and American colonialism. This parting with the world that these expatriates were so intimate with gave rise to an exilic sensibility, a sensibility that would form much of the material of Igloria’s poetry.

The award-winning Igloria, who is herself one of those diasporic figures that her verses speak of and speak to, attempts to reconcile Filipino expatriates with a genuine sense of their cultural and national identity.

She does so both in a colonial and postcolonial context. Even as she combines a poetic impression of Filipinos’ geographical and psychological displacement with the effects of foreign colonialism, Igloria composes verses that are as much about all human beings as they are about Filipinos. While forming this poetic nexus of sensitivity and commiseration with her fellow human beings, Igloria conducts a re-examination of several narratives ranging from sentimentality to aesthetics to historical recollection, and to a contemplation of the human condition as it deals with the difficult realities of the modern world.

 An important impetus in “Juan Luna’s Revolver” is Philippine history as it is rendered through Igloria’s poetic consciousness. In the book’s title poem, she conjures up the ghost of Juan Luna, the famous Filipino painter of the Philippine revolutionary period. Luna was not just renowned for his artistic prowess. He was also notorious for using a revolver no less, to kill his mother-in-law and his wife, the latter for alleged adultery.

The memory of the double murder resounds in the pages of “Juan Luna’s Revolver.” Igloria confers a power on the representation of Juan Luna’s “crime of passion” that traverses time, place, and milieu. She draws a similitude between Luna’s turn-of-the-century spousal homicide and one that transpired in Illinois in 1993. The similitude lies in the fact that in the 1993 incident, a Hispanic individual also going by the name Juan Luna gunned down several people in a restaurant. You can call it an incredible historical coincidence or an example of poetic intertextuality.

On the surface of this poem, we can make out the historical conjunction of kinships between two former colonial subjects. Beneath the same surface layer however, we see something else altogether. That is Igloria’s treatment of history as a congeries of people, events, and episodes. As part of that treatment, she gives special prominence in her book to not only Juan Luna, but to José Rizal as well. Igloria also shines the spotlight on the 1904 St. Louis World Fair where ­Filipinos were rendered by American presenters as alien, uncivilized and benighted.

 If there is an Achilles’ heel, and a minor one at that, in “Juan Luna’s Revolver” it is in the poem “Doctrina Christiana.” This profound and poignant poem is titled after the first book to ever be published in the Philippines. The problem is that the poem is not suggestive of an association with one of the more historically noteworthy aspects of that book. That aspect is the pre-colonial “baybayin” script. The revival of the baybayin script was a rejoinder to those who disregarded the significance of the pre-modern history of the Philippines. The “Doctrina Christiana” is material proof that Filipinos possessed an indigenous system of writing well-before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century.

In addition to its historical dimension, the theme of the Filipino global and historical diaspora acts as the other major presence in “Juan Luna’s Revolver.” Igloria’s poetry in this respect transports both reader and subject to a few destinations where Filipinos throughout history have alighted in. It is in this spirit that she raises the profile of Filipinos’ historical struggle with migration and dislocation. What is forged out of that struggle is a dynamic and multifaceted Filipino identity.

The poems in “Juan Luna’s Revolver” are captivating, incisive, and at times, deceivingly pointed. But this is for the best. When you read Igloria’s verses, you feel that your existence is imbued with some rich and resonant meaning once again. This is especially true for her fellow Filipinos who are eternally it seems, searching for a higher relevance in what is a forbidding life landscape.